The Europeanisation of Social Democratic Party Organisation: a framework for analysis

(Isabelle Hertner , Royal Holloway, University of London )

"Europeanisation" has become a fashionable concept over the last decade, but has only recently been applied to national political parties and party systems. While earlier studies deal with the Europeanisation of parties in a very broad fashion, recent publications narrow the focus on single national parties, party families in the European Parliament (EP), or national party systems. Lately, a cross-national study on the Europeanisation of national party organisation has been published, providing well-researched case studies. It seems, however, that publications on the subject hardly establish the link between theory and practice. Furthermore, Europeanisation is mostly interpreted as a top-down process only. Last but not least, trans-national European policy networks of national parties have not been sufficiently explored. This paper thus aims to contribute to the filling of this research gap by focusing on the Europeanisation of social democratic party organisation, analysing the impact of European integration on the internal workings of social democratic parties, in particular the British Labour Party, the French Socialist Party (PS) and the German Social Democratic Party (SPD). It is suggested that the Europeanisation of party organisation can be measured through three indicators: content analysis of party manifestos, resources spent on the formation and promotion of EU-policies and organisational change.